Digital rights management (“DRM”) is utilized to control access to a wide variety of digital content, such as video and/or audio content. Typically, a content provider either directly or indirectly controls access rights management for its digital content utilizing a rights locker. Content providers maintain rights lockers that include access information that is tied to various users or customers that have rights to access digital content of the content provider. When a user desires access to certain digital content, a rights locker is searched for a user profile or user account with the content provider, and a determination is made whether to grant access to the requested digital content based upon the accessed user account.
DRM solutions often present problems between content providers and service providers, such as content distribution networks (e.g., cable networks, satellite television networks, etc.) or other media or content distribution systems. Content providers that generate and/or provide content (e.g., audio-visual content, text-based content, non-text-based content, graphic content, software applications, etc.) to distribution network operators desire to protect the content and limit the use and/or distribution of the content to authorized use and/or distribution. Similarly, service providers that distribute content or otherwise facilitate the distribution of content to consumers desire to avoid responsibility for downstream unauthorized uses. However, a service provider may have difficulty in mapping its customers to the user accounts stored in rights lockers maintained by the content providers. Typically, a service provider tracks customers using billing accounts, and multiple users may be tied to a billing account. In turn, any number of rights accounts may be maintained in various rights lockers for the different users. Based at least in part upon the disconnect between service provider billing accounts and user rights accounts, content providers and service providers often struggle with providing a superior DRM solution to distributed content.
Accordingly, improved systems and methods for managing rights to broadband content are desirable.